Most editorials marking the death of a famous world figure tend to accentuate the positive and downplay the negative. In the case of North Korea’s enigmatic Kim Jong Il, that would be difficult to do.

As far as we are concerned, there is little on the positive side to detail. And while it is true that there is much about Kim we do not know, there are critical things we do.

Kim was a despot of the highest order. He ruled North Korea for the past 15 years with maybe the tightest iron fist on the planet, punishing anyone he thought to be an enemy with either death or confinement in one of his gulags.

To keep control of his country and avoid uprisings, Kim isolated the nation. He made North Korea virtually inaccessible to the outside world.

At the same time, Kim’s “loyal subjects” were being starved. The small country with limited resources, most devoted to the military, was in no position to take care of the daily needs of its populace, but that minor detail was secondary to Kim’s keeping power.

By far the most confounding and worrisome aspect of Kim was his belligerent and aggressive development of nuclear weapons and the ever-present threat — both veiled and overt — that he would not hesitate to use them either against the United States or our allies in South Korea and Japan.

The list of Kim’s transgressions is long. ﻿But the far more important question is what will happen now in North Korea.

Kim, thought to be about 69 when he died, had suffered a stroke in 2008. He had begun a succession process with his youngest son, Kim Jong Un. But that process apparently was not nearly complete.

Indications are that China — North Korea’s strongest ally — is moving swiftly to exercise its influence over senior officials in North Korea, particularly in the military, as a means of stabilizing the situation.

The fear is that the younger Kim may not be ready to take on a military apparatus that is by far the strongest segment of the North Korean society. Generals in Pyongyang could decide that to hold onto power they need to take a more aggressive stance toward South Korea. That would destabilize the region and could lead to ghastly consequences. Clearly, that would be in no one’s interest.

It took Kim nearly three years to consolidate power after his father died in 1994, but once he did so, he ruthlessly guarded it.

We cannot in good conscience mourn Kim’s death, but we do worry about the Korean peninsula and how his death could affect the world. We can only hope that the coolest and calmest of heads will prevail.

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